Through photo digital art works, John Goto reflects upon the final years
of Kasimir Malevich's life in Stalinist Russia. This series juxtaposes two
moments in Russian history; those of the recent past and the early Stalinist
period. In part, the images were made on Goto's travels to the industrial
zones of the Urals in 1993\4. Many of the decaying factories depicted were
built using slave-labour in the thirties and this period is further evoked
through montaged archival material as Goto reflects upon the demise of the
Suprematist painter.The final years of Malevich's life are poorly documented
and the intentions behind the works he made remain uncertain. No historical
consensus has emerged to explain why his paintings seemed to draw ever closer
to the official Socialist Realist style, or to account for his practice
of faking his own earlier works by dating images made during the early 1930s
as if they came from the pre-Revolutionary period.

In an attempt to unravel the mystery surrounding these late works,
Goto makes a speculative reading of Malevich's life and images against
the political and social event of the early Stalinist period. He picks
up the story in 1927 when Malevich toured Poland and Germany with an
exhibition that marked the high point of his career and was to guarantee
his reputation in the West long after he was all but forgotten in the
USSR. Even 'as glory falls like rain' upon Malevich, a sense of foreboding
seems to have motivated a last will that he wrote in Berlin.

As the 1920s concluded Malevich, like many intellectuals, found himself
under increasing pressure as articles and exhibitions were criticised
or censored and his research post terminated. He was arrested in 1930
and questioned over several months. This period saw the first Five Year
Plan introduced and also one of the first major trials of technicians
scapegoated for the failures of industry. Stalin turned his attention
to the countryside where the Party still lacked complete control and
began a programme of forced collectivisation of the farms. The wealthier
peasants, termed 'Kulaks', were deported in their millions. During the
winter of 1932/3 a terrible famine swept the Ukraine.

The cancer that killed Malevich was probably diagnosed in 1933, but his
requests to be allowed abroad for treatment were refused. After the assassination
in 1934 of his rival, Sergei Kirov , Stalin unleashed the Great Terror which
claimed the lives of countless millions including some of Malevich's old
students and collaborators. Malevich died on 15 May, 1935.

Dessau
Whilst in Berlin in 1927 Malevich wrote a last will, seen here in the foreground,
to cover his 'death or permanent imprisonment'. On a balcony at the Bauhaus
are (from left to right) Freidl Dicker-Brandeis, a Bauhaus trained artist
who died in Auschwitz (see Goto's Terezin series), Malevich's daughter
Una, Walter Gropius and Stalin's court painter Aleksandr Gerasimov.

A Marriage Portrait
On returning to Russia in 1927, Malevich married his third wife, Natalia
Andreevna Manchenko. She is shown here with Malevich and his daughter Una
outside the cathedral of St. Saviour in Moscow which was demolished in 1931
to make way for the aborted Palace of the Soviets.

The Informer
This image is based on Nadezhda Mandelstam's account in Hope Against
Hope of night arrests and informers within her circle. The bust in the
alcove is of Pavlik Morozov, a youth elevated to national hero for denouncing
his father and subsequently murdered by his family.

White Coal
In practice the term Kulak was applied to anyone who resisted collectivisation
in the countryside and here a diverse group await deportation. Included
is Malevich who wrote to Kiril Shutko that the 'hacks' controlling the Art
Workers Union '. . . will soon declare that we are Kulaks'. Kulaks in transit
were referred to as 'White Coal'.

The Collective
Many peasants resisted the forced collectivisation of the farms and by the
spring of 1930, fourteen million cows and a third of all pigs had been slaughtered
by their owners rather than hand them over to the government. Hundreds of
Party officials were assassinated and grain burnt or thrown into rivers.

Ukraine
As a result of collectivisation and government attempts to suppress Ukrainian
nationalism, a famine took the lives of five million people in the region
in 1932/3. Malevich was born in Kiev and as late as 1929 was a visiting
lecturer at the Kiev Institute of Art. In the foreground ca.1904, the young
Malevich is about to set off to begin his career in Moscow whilst behind
him are bodies in the street from a rare photograph of the famine. In the
field beyond, young Komsomols guard against grain 'snipers'.

Diaghilev's School
On the extreme left is Malevich's 1930s portrait of Anna Alexandrovna Leporskaya;
she appears however remarkably like his first wife Kazimira Ivanovna Zgleits,
whom he married in 1896 and is seen in the foreground. It was at this time
that he discovered the work of the painter Ilya Repin and to the right of
the young Malevich are the seated figures of Maxim Gorki and his mistress,
the actress Maria Andreevna. Repin's portrait of her leans against the chair.
In the mirror is reflected the older Malevich of the early 1930s.

Babel's New Genre
At the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, Isaak Babel announced
that he had invented a new genre, the 'Genre of Silence'. Babel was executed
in 1941.

Kirov
On the 1 December 1934, Leonid Nikolayev assassinated Stalin's rival, the
Leningrad Party boss Sergei Kirov, with a shot to the back of the head.
The murder was used as a pretext to launch The Great Terror.